It's been a big summer for the Nations. We've added some stellar talent to Leafs Nation, Canucks Army and Flames Nation. We had five writers at the draft and managed to debut Flames Nation radio. Oilers Nation radio has grown in audience with each iteration. And the return of the Jets allowed us to add the newest member site to the network.

Wanye's motley empire has grown and with that growth has come some notable content along the way. As a result, we have decided to start collecting some the network's best posts each week in one, convenient link dump.

So without futher ado, we present Around the Nation:

Rick Rypien

A number of different Nation takes appeared after Rick Rypien's tragic passing. Chemmy of Leafs Nation expressed his growing distaste with fighting in hockey in the aftermath. Guest blogger Trevor Pesiloski for Canucks Armyopines on the difficulties and stigmas people with psychological problems face while Dean Belanger has a more personal take a Jets Nation, including links to potential help for depression sufferers.

Finally, Jason Gregor implores everyone to allow the facts to come out before partisan factions of the "fighting/no fighting" start using Rypien's death as a talking point in the debate.

New Faces

After a rigorous search and some contentious voting (see comments), Flamesnation added frequent commenter and moderator Vintage Flame to the voices of the Nation. VF's debut post was a shot across the bow of Calgary's northern neighbors, replete with both detailed tables and insulting photoshops.

Leafs Nation added the detail oriented JP Nikota to the roster and he has already published two in-depth articles on Leaf shot and goal location from last season. The second article deals with Nikolai Kulemin's big jump in shooting percentage and whether it will be will be sustainable.

Controversy!

In case you missed it, Thomas Drance tracked down a french Roberto Luongo interview regarding his criticisms of Tim Thomas during the playoffs and had it translated by Stuart St-Amant. James Murphy of ESPN Boston picked up the story and used St-Aman's translation, but without attribution to Canucks Army. NESN Boston ran with it as well, but gave CA a hat-tip, as did Puck Daddy. During a twitter exchange on the matter, Murphy claimed that any attribution he gave to Sy-Amant/CA was edited out of the final cut of his post.

Potpourri

- Jonathan Willis discusses the Oilers dreadful record in one-goal games last year and suggests the team might be in line for an improvement on that front. Robin Brownlee transcribes some of Jason Gregor's interview with coach Tom Renney, specifically the bits on the utility of stats in hockey. Renney's answers struck me as entirely reasonable, including:

Like everybody else, we all pay attention to chances-plus/minus, you know, and the synergy between yourself and a defence partner or the synergy between a line, the synergy between a group of five guys, and what does that chance total look like at the end of the period, the end of a game, the end of a segment?

...I do pay close attention to that and spend a number of hours after each game sort of reviewing the game and looking at chances for and against and try to identify the synergy that might be taking place. That's important to me.

- Flamesnation's discussion of Calgary's enduring mediocrity concluded with my own look at the Flames underlying numbers against the elite teams in the NHL last season (they are predictably underwhelming). The rest of the series is summarized at the end of the post as well.

- Pension Plan Puppets takes a long lookat the Leafs October schedule, including number of home games and strength of schedule. He even looks at the Leafs opening record going back to 2005-06.

Speaking of retrospectives, Danny Grayconsiders the Leafs summer of 1997, a time of drastic change for the organization. Bill Waters was actually the interim GM for a time that off-season.